On climate, the consumer's vote will be more important than the party room's

Chief scientist, Alan Finkel, got a lot of people very excited when he released his draft report into Australia energy security last December, less than three months after the September blackout put conservatives into a flap over wind and solar.

We were in the midst of an unstoppable energy transition, he said, one based on cheap renewables, storage and smart software. And the technologies to address the reliability and security issues were at hand, though they were not being encouraged by the design of the market.

The energy system, Finkel went on, would need to shift dramatically from a centralised model (aka coal plants) to a decentralised model (aka rooftop solar and storage). The power, quite literally would return to the people. It was all rather exciting.